Refugee status cessation and PRs applying for citizenship
- Thread starter dpenabill
- Start date
Where did you travel to that time?
But did you actually travel to your home country this time (this was a separate time than above, right? Using what document? Who cancelled your citizenship application? How did you find out about this?
You should speak to a lawyer. While you can still 'do' all of the above, hard to say what risks there are. There's a lot going on here and the details matter.
If keeping PR status in Canada is important to you . . .
I agree with both @armoured and @abff08f4813c but the main thing, as @abff08f4813c put it right up front, is you definitely need to talk to an immigration lawyer.
As @armoured noted, from what's happened to what's happening, what your options are and what the risks are, there are several details that matter. The particular reason why your citizenship application was "cancelled," for example, probably says a lot about the situation. And, whether you actually traveled to your home country is really important, hugely important. BUT the main thing is it looks like this is well past the stage where a forum like this can offer much that will help you make decisions or even illuminate what your situation is . . . you need to talk to a lawyer, a lawyer you pay (or perhaps is available through some organization assisting refugees or such) to go over your situation in detail.
You posted previously and got a lot of replies previously. You need to talk to a lawyer before you do anything else. That is your next step, as we advised your previously.
New cessation related case: https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/do...64e&searchUrlHash=AAAAAQAJY2Vzc2F0aW9uAAAAAAE
That's right. In some cases cessation is triggered without submitting a citizenship application.
The other notable thing here is that he seems to be from mainland China, where dual citizenship wouldn't be recognized and where he should automatically lose his status as a citizen once he comes a Canadian citizen.
In other circumstances - someone who comes as a skilled worker via express entry for example - this choice would make more sense. It's quite understandable not wanting to give up that status and wanting to have the surety of always being able to visit your hometown and family members left behind. In a way, it's a sign of not wanting to give up ties to the old while establishing new ones elsewhere.
But specifically for refugee/asylum cases it makes somewhat less sense to me.. I'd have thought that such individuals would actually prefer to change their citizenship - and have the protecting power of Canada on their side if they ever somehow ended back up in their home country.
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I agree with you however either way I think OP would have ended up with cessation. They renewed their passport and started traveling very soon after getting PR.
I respectively disagree, assuming OP is Zhou from the latest CanLII on this thread.
Had Zhou never travelled out of Canada and timely applied for Canadian citizenship, I believe that Zhou would have already become a Canadian citizen by the time the updated rule was adopted on Dec 2012.
From May 2005 (when PR was received), eligibility for citizenship would happened on May 2008. Even assuming a rather slow three and a half years to get the grant from time of application (oath taken and all that), then by Jan 2012 the citizenship should have been in hand. I think already being a Canadian citizen by then would have protected Zhou from cessation.
This is Zhou v. Canada, 2025 CanLII 43159, https://canlii.ca/t/kc30h which is not itself a cessation case, but as @scylla couched it, it is "related" to cessation in that it is about an inadmissible Foreign National (FN) fighting physical deportation, whose inadmissibility derives from a cessation determination.
In particular, even though the subject of this decision, Gong Sheng Zhou, was a PR-refugee whose status as a protected person was revoked for cessation, automatically terminating his PR status, this is not a decision about the validity or applicability of cessation. It is about Zhou contesting physical removal/deportation, challenging a negative PRRA, much as what is done by many FNs subject to a Removal Order resisting actual deportation unrelated to cessation (most of these cases involve denied refugee claimants or former PRs who lost status due to inadmissibility for serious criminality).
That is, Gong Sheng Zhou is a FN, a former PR-refugee who lost status in Canada attendant cessation of his protected person status, pursuant to what is probably an unpublished IRB/RPD determination in April 2022, and the subsequently dismissed application for leave to appeal back in 2023 (which does not appear to be reflected in any published decision either). I don't think his case has been previously mentioned, let alone discussed here. I have been unable to correlate this decision regarding an adverse PRRA with any other decision published at CanLII potentially about Gong Sheng Zhou; also note that Zhou is a very common name, popping up in more than a thousand cases published by CanLII, but in few related to cessation. There is only one other Zhou decision since late 2022 related to cessation, a Federal Court decision last year denying an appeal by Junbao Zhou, declining to set aside a cessation decision (Zhou v. Canada, 2024 FC 895, https://canlii.ca/t/k56dh is a decision I have discussed in this forum multiple times).
We do not know many key factual details regarding Gong Sheng Zhou, and in particular we do not know much about the circumstances leading to the cessation application in 2019 or the reasoning underlying the April 2022 determination of cessation, or why that decision was not communicated to Zhou for nearly a year, not until March 2023.
While I agree it appears likely this is not about cessation involving a PR-refugee applying for citizenship (the particular subject of this thread), let alone a cessation case triggered by a citizenship application, we do not know whether or not Zhou had applied for citizenship. Moreover, assuming he did not apply for citizenship, there is not much to indicate why there was no application for citizenship.
Relevance of Citizenship Application:
As @scylla noted, cessation can be triggered without submitting a citizenship application. And for a PR-refugee who has traveled to the home country 15 times in 15 years (between 2006, when he obtained a new Chinese passport, and 2021), a number and frequency likely to trigger investigation regardless the duration of stays, it should be no surprise that cessation proceedings were successfully brought against him.
It warrants noting that cessation based on any of the grounds/reasons specified in Section 108(1) IRPA can be applied to refugees, or persons with protected person status, who do not have PR status, and those reasons can also constitute a basis for denying the grant of refugee or protected person status to claimants. There are many, many such cases, cases in which there is a determination of cessation applied to persons who are not a Canadian PR, let alone not a PR applying for citizenship.
There are multiple reasons for not spending much time addressing those cases (cessation against those who are not PRs) in this thread; the key ones are:
-- not all the grounds/reasons for cessation will result in loss of PR status; in particular, cessation based on the reasons for seeking protection having ceased to exist will not result in the termination of PR status
-- there is a difference in what constitutes and what shows "intent" to reavail home country protection, for those who have permanent resident status compared to those who do not, and even though this has not been directly addressed much (in published decisions), as such, the differences permeate the underlying factual analysis and, in particular, what evidence might rebut the presumption of reavailment . . . recognizing that reavailment is the most common ground for cessation of those with PR status (by a big margin) and the presumption of intent to reavail home country protection is the critical element that dictates the outcome in most these cases
Take-aways relative to whether there is a citizenship application:
There is no doubt, there is a real risk of being subject to cessation if a PR-refugee travels to their home country, even just once, even if they do not apply for citizenship. The risk increases the more often a PR-refugee uses a home country passport, increasing a lot the more often the PR-refugee travels to the home country, and also by a lot the longer the PR-refugee stays in the home country.
Meanwhile, for a PR-refugee who has obtained and used a home country passport, and even more so for one who has traveled to the home country, applying for citizenship can trigger a cessation investigation and cessation proceedings. By making the application a PR-refugee discloses they have obtained a home country passport (if they have had a home country passport that was valid for any time during the previous five years), and any travel to the home country within the previous five years . . . of course this assumes they are being truthful and complete in the application, recognizing any failure to do so would be misrepresentation by omission subject to severe consequences and more likely to make things worse; odds of sliding by not good. Corollary: Any PR-refugee who has traveled to their home country should SEE a LAWYER before applying for citizenship.
Potential reasons for why there was no citizenship application:
Assuming Gong Sheng Zhou did not apply for Canadian citizenship (while that seems likely, we do not know for sure that is the case), there are several reasons which could explain that in addition to (and apart from) making a choice to retain Chinese citizenship rather than obtain Canadian citizenship. The most common reasons for PR-refugees not obtaining Canadian citizenship beyond when they meet the grant citizenship requirement for residence (until 2015) or physical presence (since 2015), are problems meeting the language ability requirement or prohibitions arising from criminality (that does not rise to the level of serious criminality that would lead to the loss of PR status), or a combination of factors which can preclude meeting the residence or physical presence requirement (such as length of absences plus periods of probation). Since we do not know anything about the duration of his stays in China, or elsewhere outside Canada, but we know there were many trips to the home country (15 in 15 years), it is not at all clear Zhou ever met the residency requirement, or later the physical presence requirement.
Note that in some of the cases discussed here the PR-refugee spent remarkably lengthy periods in the home country, some essentially working in their home country and barely in Canada long enough to comply with the PR Residency Obligation (let alone meet the presence requirement for citizenship). These are mostly the older cases, the lengthy stays in the home country being before the change in law in December 2012 (when cessation had no impact on refugees with PR status). But even after the change in law, some PR-refugees continued to spend considerable periods of time in their home country. We do not know much about how much time Zhou spent in or out of Canada.
It may be worth also remembering that even when the law changed, for many years there continued to be widespread ignorance of the change, widespread ignorance of the consequences.
